More feedback wanted, guys!
http://213.88.244.247/views/games
…what do you think of this proposed new design? This is the (as yet incomplete) main-entrance for playing games (i.e. no developer articles etc).
Ignore the links etc, they’re just placeholders for now, and/or trying to guage the text-lengths for typical game-names etc.
As I’ve said privately:
No offense to weston’s original design but I really really like the new look. Its very clean and professional.
Kev
clean… except all of the art is grainy. The fonts don’t smooth themselves at all on my computer either, I wonder why. To me the grainy images make the site look very unprofessional.
[quote]clean… except all of the art is grainy.
[/quote]
Yeah- placeholders! No point faffing around making sure every image is perfect until the design is settled on. Stuff is just copy/pasted from places until you’re sure how you want it…
If you’re using MSIE, this appears to be a problem with windows + MSIE + the “Impact” font. I can’t check other OS’s, since Impact is a windows-only one - but it looks a lot nicer that just plain sans.
I like the new layout too, except for the use of the tags. I mean, they look good because of the text being right with the border and all, but there’s no way to control the color (that I know of) through CSS or anything. the color of the text depends on the OS’s theme (and with windows XP blue theme, blue text doesnt go so great with that background…)
other than that the layout looks good 
The font also looks pretty bad in win+firefox. Impact looks only good for really big text.
I like the new layout too, except for the use of the tags
I’ve never seen tags before… in my case the text is just black. Uhm.
I like the new look better, it’s simpler and easier.
I’d like the “New games” and “Best games” to be on the right, though, as having them on the left implies they’re there for navigation purposes. I also think they’re a bit too large. I’m surfing at 16001200, so no problem here, but it would be if I were surfing at 800600. Just slim down the gfx a bit, and move them over. I really like the new colour-scheme.
BTW: you still need donations? I’ve got 2 or 3 pounds on my paypal acct (literally 2 or 3, I’m NOT rich )
[quote]I like the new layout too, except for the use of the tags. I mean, they look good because of the text being right with the border and all, but there’s no way to control the color (that I know of) through CSS or anything. the color of the text depends on the OS’s theme (and with windows XP blue theme, blue text doesnt go so great with that background…)
[/quote]
I get a white background in both Firefox and IE. The text in question does show up blue in IE, but in Firefox it is black.
[quote](and with windows XP blue theme, blue text doesnt go so great with that background…)
[/quote]
Yes, but…you’re looking at the wrong page (see my post before my last one) ;D.
Allegedly, it’s possible/easy to change the legend colour, but I’ve not bothered to check it out yet (had more important things to worry about :(). Going with a white BG would remove the problem…
I might have to set up a version like that so you can see, but … it just looked WEIRD with them on the right. I can’t explain it. Best I could come up with was that mostly you read the LH edge of the main content (you read the news title, NOT the date, etc), and so in the present scheme you are close to reading down the centre of the screen, but in the other way around you end up reading down the extreme left edge of screen.
Howabout you hang on a bit, give me time to make some other pages in this style, and link them in. Then, when you’ve got 4 or 5 linked together, see what you think, and re-comment on the left/right handedness?
Other than that, I see what you mean - I originally did it the other side, but it looked so bad I switched it.
I’m not designing for 800. It’s so unfair on the people with 1200 or greater - or on the designer, to have to make compeltely separate copies of the same source for different res’s :P. I mainly aim at 1024, which is now almost universal (save for the 10% or so of exceptions).
re: size, part of the problem is that I haven’t overlaid the screenshots :). Each grey rounded-rect will have a screenshot inside it, taking up almost the entire thing. The sizes make more sense one you see it like that (sorry, only have it setup like that on my home LAN at the moment).
Also, this is the front page you’ll see when you type “http://javagamesfactory.org”, so it’s intended to be simple and REALLY easy to find the games. The “top 5 games” will intially be admin-selected and rotated, so we can guarantee they are genuinely good - big fat welcome to give a good impression. Once you link off this page into the “all games” pages, things will be less gigantic (I think; but I only have rough sketches so far, so I’m not sure yet).
Also, it’s about expectations. I checked out 20 of the main “competitors”. Look at popcap.com for possibly the most extreme example. A lot of people play popcap.
[quote]The font also looks pretty bad in win+firefox. Impact looks only good for really big text.
I’ve never seen tags before… in my case the text is just black. Uhm.
[/quote]
:(. Fonts + web == sucks. Even now, ten years after I first made that statement to someone when I was first doing websites, it’s almost no better. Sob. I don’t have the time to make anti-aliased/smoothed GIF’s (remember, folks: MSIE doesn’t support PNG!) for each and every H1, H2, H3 (those are the things using IMPACT, with some styling tricks layered over them), so it won’t happen unless someone else does it (and maintains it).
I don’t want to have to remove Impact entirely, because side-by-side with sans it really does complement the rest of the page much better (when rendered tolerably!).
Argh. This is why I never became a web designer!
If you’ve nothing better to do with it, send it over. The paypal account is now being held “in reserve”. Firstly, if anything happens to the Agency9 donated server, we’ll need that money immediately to get a new, commercial, server ASAP. Secondly, if the server remains fine, the money will be used for general community-support.
For instance, ideas suggested so far include:
Better ideas are welcomed :).
I’ll still be trying to negotiate freebies for competitions and so on, e.g. programming books, e.g. Java branded stuff, etc - but being able to buy something really useful is always helpful in case that doesn’t work.
I guarantee the money won’t be used for anything non-community-related (“community” == java games developers). When (eventually!) we get some kind of forums set up, I’ll make a forum for suggestions for good uses…
Sob, sob. RFC 1867 is a PITA. I’m struggling to find a way to implement it with some semblence of efficiency. Unfortunately, unlike HTTP, this RFC doesn’t tell you in advance how many bytes there are in each upload - so there appears to be NO WAY of streaming data from the network card direct to disk.
Since we’ll be having incoming uploads regularly of 5Mb - 10Mb this really ****es me off. I’m going to have to read every damn byte of every damn upload just to find the end-of-file!
Argh! Any suggestions for how to get around this would be gratefully received.
I might instead just do something really irritating, like copy SourceForge.net’s annoying system (hey, at least I now know why the heck they have such an annoying system!): create a dedicated FTP site where you have to upload your files, then you have to go to a page on the website that asks for the names of the files you upload (which you have to choose from a list of recently uploaded ones), and then the server has to move them out of the FTP directory and into wherever it actually needs them.
But I’m not sure we can risk that - the chance of someone deciding to use it as a porn-distributing-server etc.
uhm - formbased upload is still a http request, so you should get a Content-Length header?
Nope.
RFC 1867 defines that file upload should not be done using x-www-url-encoded (or whatever the name for the default for forms is), but instead should use a MIME application/multi-part which is a protocol invented for email servers for sending an email with attachments (and also for sending multiple versions of the same email, e.g. HTML and plaintext, all at once).
Mozilla refuses to upload a file AT ALL if you don’t tell it to use the MIME upload, and I suspect it does that because MSIE does it that way (although I haven’t checked yet).
Even with the www-encoded type, you STILL wouldn’t know where the file ends because there could be an arbitrary number of “&name=value” form inputs tacked on the end - thre’s no standard that says what order the browser MUST submit forms in, other than that most just submit the data in the order it appears in the HTML doc (and MSIE doesn’t implement forms according to the HTML 4 spec anyway).
The “so simple even Homer would have thought of it” way of doing 1867 would seem to me to be to put a separate content-length on each and every element. But they didn’t do that. Bastards.
you might want to look at the apache commons project for some stuff:
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/fileupload/
Interesting link, thanks. But, AFAICS, they’re just reading every byte into memory, and then as soon as the buffer is full they dump the buffer to disk and then further reads into memory are re-written into the disk.
It relies on J2EE’s servlets, which provide only an InputStream. So at the very best it’s not going to be any better than rolling my own, and it would require implementing lots of servlet interfaces just to get the Apache stuff to work. Might also have problems interfacing it with the incoming NBIO.
Eventually, after talking around a lot, I accepted that I was being overly conservative (or, if you prefer, an idiot) to think that such inefficiencies were going to be a problem with uploads. Sure, we can get thousands of hits a minute, but we’re not going to be getting thousands of uploads a minute.
So, with HTTP upload out of the way, we’re very very nearly there with being able to submit games and host them on the server, all automated. Phew.
In the meantime…you can now propose articles directly on the test-server, and view other people’s proposals and comment on them.
Just go to the developers front page:
http://213.88.244.247/views/developers
then click on “tutorials” and “view proposals”. Apologies for all the adjacent dead links - I’m testing rendering of the same layout in different browsers at the moment, so I need to stuff the pages with content to check layout (you wouldn’t believe how different Mozilla, Opera, and MSIE are even in 2004…).